Workers’ Compensation and Moral Hazard in Tunisia

Moral hazard is a problem of asymmetric information that plays a central role in numerous contractual relationships and may lead to suboptimal resource allocation. Both ex ante and ex post moral hazard problems in workers’ compensation (WC) have been extensively analysed in developed countries. The main objective of this paper is to test the presence of ex post moral hazard in the Tunisian context. To our knowledge, this is the first analysis on this topic in a developing country, Tunisia. It is particularly important to study moral hazard problems in developing countries, since the negative impacts of such problems could be exacerbated in the developing world. Dionne and St-Michel (1991) have developed a methodology for testing for the presence of ex post moral hazard in the context of a more generous WC regime in Quebec. The Tunisian institutional context that we study is similar to that prevailing in Quebec; that is, in 1995, there was a significant increase in the generosity of the WC regime. Applying a more general econometric technique than that used by Dionne and St-Michel, we find that this increase in the generosity of WC led to longer periods out of work for recovery. This increase is more pronounced in the case of difficult-to-diagnose injuries.     

Inventing Egypt for the Emerging British Travel Class: Amelia Edwards' A Thousand Miles up the Nile

In 1877, the Victorian-era writer Amelia Edwards published a travelogue of her first excursion to Egypt. By placing her work within the context of British–Egyptian relations during the late nineteenth century, this article argues that works like hers created a romantic notion of ancient Egypt for the English middle class, and helped spawn English tourism to Egypt. Travel to Egypt encouraged popular support for Egyptology that ultimately helped the field to develop into a celebrated discipline. A variety of unpublished, archival material from the British National Archives and a collection of Amelia Edwards' private papers support these conclusions.     

Environmental Policy,Public Interest and Political Market

In this paper, we highlight the factorswhich influence governments in theirdecision to implement environmentalpolicies of varying degrees of severity. Wesubstantiate our arguments with analyticalevidence from the public interest theoryand the economic theory of regulation(``interest group theory''). We show, throughempirical analysis based on the policies of22 OECD countries, that pressure groupshave sufficient impact on environmentalregulation so that the economic theorypredominates over the public interesttheory.